We're releasing a long-awaited feature on the 29th July: Parent and Student accounts 🎉.
We have purposely waited until one of the quieter periods of the year to release these changes on Sherpa, giving you some time to get accustomed before the busier period starts again in September.
For you, as a tutor, the changes are minimal and your workflow will likely remain mostly unchanged. However, we want to ensure you are comfortable with the changes before they are live on the 29th July.
Please take 5 minutes to read through our guide. If anything is not clear, please get in touch via the live chat in the bottom right and a member of our team will be happy to help.
Why are we making these changes?
As you'll likely know, students often share accounts with their parents. This means parents are unable to message you privately without the student having access to the message. Additionally, when you message a student, you're not sure whether you're speaking to the parent or student.
Not ideal! With these new changes, parents will be able to add students to their account. These students can be added to bookings and introductions. They'll be able to:
Message you separately from their parents
Receive lesson notification reminders
Join introductions and lessons from their own accounts
Review their lesson recordings and notes
An Overview Of The Changes 👀
The simplest way to explain these new changes is by explaining the two scenarios in which you'll work with student accounts and how the system will connect you.
Scenario 1: The parent messages you, scheduling the introduction and booking.
That's it! This is fairly identical to how Sherpa works now. The only change is that the parent is prompted to add a student when confirming a booking request.
Scenario 2: The student messages you and arranges the introduction.
This is the new flow, which still works very similarly to the old one. The main difference is that when the student signs up, they add their parent to their account.
When this happens, your new messages page will look like this:
In the above example - Jim is the child of Sarah. Jim has organised an introduction with you and you've automatically been introduced to Sarah via messenger.
Heading to your Bookings page, you can see your new introduction with Sarah and Jim:
You can accept and decline that as normal. Both Jim and Sarah will be notified.
Once you've had the introduction, you agree with Sarah that you'll have lessons with Jim every Monday at 4pm.
Not much has changed here! The easiest way to set this up is by going to your conversation with Jim...
And clicking the 'Book a Lesson' button in the sidebar.
The student will receive the booking request and can accept from their side. The parent will also be notified and can accept from their side if necessary.
Students cannot create booking requests. You'll need to send them over to the student, or let the parent send you the booking request.
What will happen to my existing students?
Nothing! All existing user accounts on Sherpa will be treated as general accounts. All of your existing students will remain unchanged when you log in on the 29th July.
On the 29th, we'll be notifying our users that they can now add their children to their account.
Parents will be able to go to the 'Edit Booking' page, and from there, add a new student to a booking in the left sidebar:
When a parent adds a student to one of your bookings, you'll receive a new message from the student, telling you that they've been added to one of your bookings!
What about students over 18?
Students over 18 have their own unique signup flow:
They'll be identical to current Sherpa accounts. They won't have the ability to add students to their account and can do everything a current user can.